He loved modern art

Fine Arts

'The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism'

Published 09/27/2012

by Sura Wood

De Young Museum curator Timothy Anglin Burgard discusses
Paul Gauguin's "The Seed of the Areoi" during a press tour of The
William S. Paley Collection: A Taste of Modernism on exhibit at the de Young Museum. (Photo: Rick Gerharter)

Reliable sources have reported that CBS founder and chairman
William S. Paley hung his prized possession, Paul Gauguin's "The Seed of
the Areoi" (1892), in front of his home movie projector, and moved the
painting out of the way whenever he watched I Love Lucy
or other of his network's television shows. Whether
or not the story is true, it's a curious metaphor for the collision of old
world and new media, and the personal contradictions of the enterprising son of
Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who built a broadcasting empire and launched the
careers of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. So what did he do in his spare
time? A pragmatic man and a wealthy one, not above embellishing his resume or
conflating his biography, Paley used some of his considerable fortune to
acquire adventurous, ahead-of-the-curve modern art.

The aforementioned Gauguin canvas, which served as
camouflage and decor, depicts the beautiful, raven-haired queen of a Polynesian
secret society holding a fertility symbol in her hand –the model was the
artist's 13-year-old Tahitian mistress – surrounded by the lush South Sea
island landscape. And it's just one of many masterpieces found in A Taste
for Modernism, an exciting new show of
sumptuous artworks at the de Young, primarily focusing on late-19th and early-20th
century artists of the French School and School of Paris. The show is a
sampling of Paley's collection, born of a happy confluence of plentiful disposable
income and a pair of wives with sophisticated, discerning taste in art, taste
that reflected the Francophile inclinations and anti-German bias of NYMOMA in
the 1930s, where Paley was a trustee. Those influences helped shape Paley, who
started out buying English hunting prints before moving up several notches to
paintings by Degas, Bonnard, Vuillard, Derain, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse,
Cezanne, Picasso and others on view here. There are also well-chosen bronze
sculptures by Gaston Lachaise and Aristide Maillol, as well as drawings like "Two
Dancers"(1905), Degas' classically beautiful, deceptively simple charcoal
of his favorite subject, as well as sketches by Picasso, Renoir, and one by Ben
Shahn showing Murrow as St. George, slaying a dragon personified by Joe
McCarthy.

Three sculptures by Aristide Maillol, with Pablo Picasso's
"Boy Leading a Horse" in the background, at The William S. Paley
Collection: A Taste of Modernism exhibit at
the de Young Museum. (Photo: Rick Gerharter)

The characteristically unsettling, tortured, bloody-scarlet
imagery of Francis Bacon's "Three Studies for the Portrait of Henrietta
Moraes" (1963) inhabits the opening gallery. Adapted from photographs
taken by Bacon's friend, it's a fractured psychological triptych, a vision of
the divided self, a human with many faces not unlike Paley himself. Nearby, "Figures
and Star"(1949), a tiny, delicate, slyly humorous oil and pastel by Miro
of a sharp-beaked, bird-like creature, a female form and an asterisk is
achieved with a sublime shorthand only the gifted Spaniard Catalan was capable
of. The warm sensuality of "Reclining Nude" (1897) finds Bonnard
indulging in his ongoing obsession with Marthe, his lover, model and later his
wife, who's stretched out on a couch amidst ochre and brown tones, her head
resting on a white pillow. It's displayed next to a trio of small Vuillard
paintings of lived-in, intimate interiors with inviting indirect light and
subtle shadows.

Henri Matisse's "Odalisque with a Tambourine"
at The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste of Modernism
exhibit at the de Young Museum. (Photo: Rick
Gerharter)

Several of the extraordinary Picassos will trigger a
sensation of deja vu: "Boy Leading
a Horse" (1905-06), of a young circus performer adrift in a barren
existential landscape guiding a white steed with invisible reins; "Nude
with Joined Hands" (1906), a portrait of Picasso's beloved mistress
Fernande Olivier, standing naked against a sunset coral background; and "The
Architect's Table" (1912), considered by many the greatest of the cubist
paintings, were purchased from the Stein family and displayed at last year's Steins
Collect exhibition at SFMOMA. Like the
Steins, Paley had a fondness for Matisse, whose atmospheric "Odalisque
with a Tambourine" (1925-26) evokes the languorous sensuousness of the
South of France. In a room crowded with furnishings sits a voluptuous naked
woman on the verge of sliding off a green and yellow upholstered chair; one arm
draped casually around the back of her neck, her robe falls away to expose her
ample breasts. Above her, a window opens onto a patch sky so blue and pure one
can almost breathe the sea air and hear the waves of the Mediterranean lapping
on the beach outside.

To experience this exhibition is to partake of a very
personal collection of hand-picked works selected with an eye for beauty and
technical brilliance, What would it be like to live with objects of such piercing
aesthetic beauty, to open The New York Times on Sunday morning to find the faded blooms of Manet's exquisite essay
on mortality, "Two Roses on a Tablecloth," looking back at you? That
question is answered, at least vicariously, by a dozen large color photographs
of the Paleys' opulent, antique-filled Fifth Avenue apartment, where the
paintings are seen hanging on the walls like birds of paradise alighting in a
garden of earthly delights.